Monday, March 5, 2012

Back when Priscilla was a kitten, she loved to sleep on top of my computer monitor. Now that I've graduated to a laptop - and she's "put on a few pounds" - she makes herself content sprawling across the keyboard, rubbing her head against the side of the screen, and lightly chewing on the power cord, which bears the unmistakable mark of tiny kitty teeth.

While most of my technical complaints are cosmetic, Reddit user pope_friction was having far worse problems. His cat had taken a liking to his warm wireless router, and her habit of indulging in hours-long naps on the device was causing his internet to hit the skids. Frustrated, he took to his ISP's online forum to try to find a solution. His plea was tongue-in-cheek, but one supervisor took it to heart, and offered up a purrfect example of good customer service.

The problem is the router is apparently very attractive to my cat. She sleeps on top of it for most of the day and frequently knocks the aerial about, taking my wireless network down.

She stays in the position shown above for hours, with the top of her head against the top of the router, as if she's interfacing with it somehow.

I'm sick of my internet going down all the time due to this - is there a fix?

I was thinking perhaps Be (the ISP provider) could send me a decoy router, then I could hide the real one somewhere else. I'm not sure if she could tell the difference."

***

He wasn't expecting much of a reply, but received a helpful response, along with a hidden plea for more cute cat pictures (emphasis added is my own):

"Dear Liam,

I'm contacting you regarding your post on our forum.

For many years this issue has bothered our customers. As you can see in the thread it is not only the BeBox susceptible to such feline interferences. We have brainstormed this for a few hours, but regrettably we were unable to find any plausible solution.

We decided to send you a decoy router as you requested, however we will need some proof that the cat in the picture is a real one. Can you please send us more cute pictures of the aggressor?

Also we will need appropriate address for the decoy router to be sent."

***

The company shipped out the decoy as promised, and the adorable - albeit, gullible - Tuxedo kitty ended up taking the bait. Liam is now able to browse the internet uninterrupted, however, there's no word yet on what happened when the cat discovered she could no longer go online to check her Catster profile.

If you're having similar issues, there's some interesting tips on how to curb your cat's technological curiosities over on the Wired How-To Wiki.